Physicians typically diagnose a patient's ailment by eliciting a history, or a complete description, of symptoms from the patient. In most situations, the physician will subsequently perform a physical exam guided by the symptom history. Based on information elicited from this investigation, the physician, relying on his knowledge base and experience, reaches a conclusion regarding the most likely diagnosis for the patient, or at least a series of most likely diagnoses (sometimes called a ‘differential diagnosis’) for that patient. The physician then attempts to narrow this list of differential diagnoses to the most likely working diagnosis using continued clinical observation along with any accompanying diagnostic tests that the physician deems to be necessary. Based on the working diagnosis, the physician then recommends a therapy to treat the identified ailment. For most diagnoses, there are a limited range of recommended treatments proven effective to treat the condition.
Accordingly, the physician's own expertise has always been the limiting factor in reaching an accurate diagnosis. Patients have necessarily become dependent on the unpredictable and variable quality of each physician's clinical ability to reach an accurate diagnosis, typically based on the physician's knowledge base, daily functioning condition and experience—all of which invite at least some amount of human error. Moreover, after diagnosis is reached by the physician, the physician's knowledge and judgment regarding the most effective therapy has always been the sole determinant of which therapeutic options to choose to treat the diagnosed condition.
The practices described above (i.e., taking of a history, physical examinations, testing, etc.) have traditionally been recorded in a hard copy medical record format. However, electronic medical records have more recently become a significant facet of the modern health care system. Electronic maintenance of medical records often ensures the delivery of accurate, cost effective medical care by providing efficient access to a patient's medical history, in addition to a reliable means of recording the patient's present and future complaints. However, while currently available software products proficiently acquire data in a comprehensive, legible, transmissible medical record that primarily facilitates office management and billing efficiencies, these systems are not able to use patient information to serve any type of diagnostic function.
Based on the current state of the art, it would be desirable for medical care professionals to be able to reach consistent and reliable diagnoses that are not limited by the physician's own expertise. This result would be still more desirable in developing nations where there may be a dearth of well qualified physicians, harnessing physician assistants or nurses, able to produce high quality diagnostic results on their own. Thus, it would be advantageous to have an improved method and system for implementing a software tool with interactive diagnostic capabilities, and which uses the artificial intelligence of the system to “weigh” or “judge” the likelihood of a particular diagnosis. It would further be advantageous for this improved method and system to be operable in conjunction with an electronic medical records system.